A lawsuit filed by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton accuses AllState and its data analytics subsidiary Arity of illegally tracking drivers without their knowledge or consent, as well as collecting and selling location data. According to the lawsuit, AllState accomplished this through "secretly embedded software" in third-party smartphone applications, such as Life360. The lawsuit comes less than six months after reported alleged major car makers were
selling driver data for pennies.
"Our investigation revealed that Allstate and Arity paid mobile apps millions of dollars to install Allstate’s tracking software," said Attorney General Paxton. "The personal data of millions of Americans was sold to insurance companies without their knowledge or consent in violation of the law. Texans deserve better and we will hold all these companies accountable."
According to the lawsuit, AllState and its subsidiary harvested trillions of miles of location data from over 45 million insured customers across the nation, resulting in the "world's largest driving behavior database." Even worse, it's alleged that this illegal data collection and vast network led to premium price hikes, not just by AllState but by other insurance companies as well.
The lawsuit says the illicit data collection provided AllState and others with a treasure trove of information, including a phone's geolocation data, accelerometer data, magnetometer data, and gyroscopic data. Collectively, these data points can track a driver's speed, in addition to their precise location, including altitude, longitude, and latitude.
On top of the base fee provided to developers to integrate the tracking software into their apps, the lawsuit claims AllState and its subsidiary offered "generous bonus incentives" for creating larger datasets. At the time of the lawsuit, it's said these apps could capture data every 15 seconds or faster from 40 million active drivers.
"Once collected, Defendants found several ways to monetize the ill-gotten data,
including by selling access to Defendants’ driving behavior database to other Insurers and using
the data for Allstate Defendants’ own insurance underwriting. If a consumer requested a car
insurance quote or had to renew their coverage, Insurers would access that consumer’s driving
behavior in Defendants’ database," the lawsuit alleges.
Not only did this result in higher premiums, but also denied coverage or dropping drivers from insurance plans altogether, the
lawsuit states (PDF).
Other apps named in the
AllState tracking lawsuit include GasBuddy, Fuel Rewards, and Routely. Collectively, these and other apps with tracking controls were download over 115 million times from Google Play. It's a bit harder to track download stats on iOS, though GasBuddy along boasts it has over 100 million downloads across iOS and Android.